Once again, I find myself in a position where I should apologize for the delay in posting this last vblog conversation I had with Intel's CISO, Malcolm Harkins. I could say that I saved the best for last but frankly, they are all good (in my never-to-be-humble opinion ). The last question I posed to Malcolm was what are the security challenges a company faces when employees want to start using their own devices within the corporate environment?

Malcolm talks about both the benefits and challenges of IT Consumerization. For example, how do you intermingle or keep corporate and personal data separate on the same device? Check out his answer below and if you haven't had a chance to catch the other four, the links are here.

Having setup the Social Computing platform for the enterprise, how does IT determine the success of the platform? Should IT be satisfied that one more tool-set is available for the employees to engage with? How does IT calculate the return on investment made in enabling social computing within the enterprise? Should IT continue to invest on this platform? What are the indicators that show that the platform is used for the benefits of the company?

There are numerous questions that come to our mind when we think of enterprise 2.0 platform. It is a challenge to calculate the productivity gain resulting from the enterprise social computing platform. I don’t think there a direct formula for “Return on Influence”, an indicator which says “A knowing B through the platform" has helped A solve a complex technical challenge” and reduce the cycle time for the issue resolution. However, we do know that the platform acts as an enabler for collaboration and knowledge management. We may not be able to identify the tangible gains, but intangible gain of connected workforce, reuse of information, preventing re-invention of wheels are significant gains from the platform.

At Intel, we do have our internal Social Computing platform. Some of the metrics we track are related to adoption – such as active users (creators, synthesizers, consumers) and “unique visitors”. However, these indicators may not accurately represent the success indicators of the platform. Quality of discussions, impact of these discussions on the users, problem resolutions, agility in solving issues, ability to find subject matters experts quickly could be different parameters which can really show how successful the platform is.

As we will start looking into social analytics more, I would like to hear from on how you measure your enterprise 2.0 platform. Do you feel employees are more productive and collaborative through the use of the platform? Or is there a cultural barrier in using the platform to its full potential?